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A selection of prints with erotic themes, made by Picasso between 1964 and 1970, presented in dialogue with nineteenth-century Japanese shunga prints.

While all of Picasso’s work is imbued with eroticism and sensuality, there were two periods—at the start of his career (1900-1908) and in his final years (1964-1972)—when the artist devoted himself intensely to explicitly erotic subjects. If the notes and sketches of the first period are an irreverent autobiographical chronicle of his youth, in the etchings of the last years the various framings, perspectives and techniques of representation endow the images with such a powerful erotic charge as to make the viewer the voyeur at whom the scene is aimed.

The exhibition will also include a selection of shunga, nineteenth-century Japanese erotic prints, in which there are clear parallels with the scenes depicted by Picasso, both in the use of similar compositions and in the formal treatment used to describe the female nude and to explore male desire and the sexual act.

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